A message flashed across the screen. “Your brother has been badly hurt! We’ve been trying to call you!”
Her heart sped up with panic. Her older brother, Donavan, had struggled for years with substance abuse issues. In trouble with the law, running with a horrible crowd, in and out of expensive rehab centers…
It seemed like he’d finally straightened out his life, married a sweet bobcat shifter, quit working for their parents’ construction company and found a job in another city, which was the healthiest thing he could possibly have done. What could have happened to him? Had he relapsed? Gotten in an accident?
I am a horrible person for not having called my parents back. Donny’s probably lying in a hospital bed somewhere, wondering why I’m not there. I don’t deserve a fated mate; I don’t deserve any kind of mate.
She frantically punched in her mother’s number.
Her mother answered on the first ring. “Well, there you are,” her mother said irritably. She didn’t sound anywhere near as upset as she should be. Maternal warmth had never been her strong suit.
“What happened to Donny?” Lainey demanded. “How bad is it?”
“First, you need to tell us where you are.” Frost rimmed her mother’s words.
“This is simply not acceptable,” her father chimed in. “You’re making us look like fools in front of our friends. Nobody cancels a wedding that has been announced in the paper. You simply carry on. That’s what your mother and I do.”
Her mother and father couldn’t stand each other and slept in rooms at opposite ends of their very large house.
“Since the wedding was based on a lie created by both of you, I certainly can, and did, cancel it. Tell me what happened to Donny.” She bit the words out, simmering with frustration.
“If you want to find out what happened to your brother, you will tell us where you are.” Her mother’s voice was firm and unyielding.
Fury boiled up inside Lainey, and for a brief moment, resignation. She needed to know where her brother was. She’d have to tell them where she was. Then they’d come out here and find a way to drag her back to Philly. Goodbye to freedom, she thought.
How could her parents be so heartless? How could they sound so calm when Donny was hurt?
And then a terrible suspicion swept over her. If something had happened to her, yes, they certainly would sound this calm. But to Donavan? No way. They’d be frantic, hysterical. He was, had always been, the favored child. Handsome, athletic, not fat…her parents had indulged his every whim. If they were shopping and he glanced at a toy, they rushed to buy it for him. They skipped Lainey’s plays and piano recitals because they were always too busy with work, but they went to every soccer game, every basketball game, of Donny’s.
If anything, Lainey felt they held a good portion of the blame for Donny going off the rails when he was in his teens. He knew that he never had to face consequences for anything. Every time he got in trouble, their parents rushed to blame everybody else and assure Donny that he could do no wrong.
“Hello?” her mother snapped. “Do you care about your brother at all?”
“Donny isn’t injured, is he?” Lainey asked. “You actually used that against me to trick me into calling you back. How could you? Just when I thought you couldn’t stoop any lower…”
Both her parents yelled into the phone at the same time.
“Everything that we did, we did for you!” her father shouted.
“Are you calling me a liar? How could you speak to your mother that way?” her mother yelled.
“I cannot believe you did this. I’m going to hang up, and call Donovan right now. If I can’t reach him, I’ll call his wife, or his work. I will let them know that my parents told me that he was seriously injured, and I just wanted to find out if it was true or not.”
“Don’t you dare.” Her mother’s voice rose in hysteria. “Don’t you dare tell anyone we said that.”
“Goodbye. I’m changing my phone number.” Furious, she hung up the phone.
She’d give Donny her new number. Donavan was as exasperated with their parents as she was. He didn’t like their social climbing, their obsession with appearances, or the way they treated his sweet but socially un-impressive wife and belittled her career as a nurse.
Lainey began pacing angrily on the grass. How did her parents always do this to her? Was she really such a selfish person, to want to marry for love, and only for love?
She should have smelled a rat from the beginning. Of course someone like Miles wouldn’t be interested in someone like her. Her stomach turned over at the memory of the phone conversation she’d overheard.
Doubt began to creep in, wrapping dark tendrils around her heart and squeezing hard. Were her parents right? Was Miles the best she could ever hope for? Should she call them back and—
Shouts of terror rang through the air, jerking her out of her gloomy reverie. Childish shouts of terror.
She ran towards the sound, and broke into a small clearing where a child had climbed onto the end of a very skinny branch on a massive oak tree. The branch was fifty feet off the ground, bending under the child’s weight and about to snap.
A group of wolf-shifter children were gathered around the base of the tree, shrieking in panic, screaming “Felix! Get down!”
Chapter Four
Lainey looked up at the tree and made a split second assessment. If there was one area of life where a bobcat shifter had mad skills, it was tree climbing. Shifting would destroy her clothes, of course, but it couldn’t be helped.
Within an instant, faster than she’d ever shifted before, she was in bobcat form, racing towards the tree. Her claws shot out, and with a mighty leap, she sank them into the bark and then shot straight up the trunk, branches whacking her in the face, adrenaline jolting through her.
She ran along a sturdy branch that was below the one the little wolf-shifter cub was clinging to, and leaped up, catching his shirt in her jaws just as the branch gave way underneath him with a crack.
Her leap carried her down to another branch, where she landed with a thud, clinging to him for dear life, claws sinking into the wood. Then she leaped from branch to branch until they’d safely reached the ground, where she deposited him in the grass.
Her clothing lay in shreds on the ground. She grabbed up her skirt in her jaws and ran behind a bush, where she shifted back into human form.
“Don’t come back here, I’m not decent!” she called out to the kids, who ignored her, racing around the bush.
“Hey! I’m half naked here!” She barely had time to cover herself with what was left of her skirt, tying it into a makeshift sarong.
“Of course you are, you just shifted. You must be from the city. Nobody here cares about that kind of thing.” A young blond girl with braids stuck her hand out. “I’m Schuyler. Thanks for saving my stupid brother.”
“I am not stupid.” The little boy glowered at her. Then he turned to Lainey. “That was awesome. Can we do it again?”
“No, you moron, you almost broke your neck,” Schuyler said. “And she ruined all her clothes because of you. I’m telling Tate.”
“Telling me what?”
The last voice that Lainey wanted to hear rumbled from behind the bushes, and then Tate Calloway strode up.
Lainey froze on the spot. This was a nightmare. He’d see her flab hanging out, her lumpy rolls, her cellulite…
“What’s going on here?” he said.
“Felix climbed like a hundred feet up that tree and climbed along a really skinny branch and it was going to break but this lady came along and turned into a cat and grabbed him with her jaws and climbed back down and saved him,” Schulyer said, without taking a breath. “She’s a bobcat shifter.”
“Felix?” Tate swung on him with a glare.
The little boy hung his head. “Sorry, Tate.”
“I would certainly hope so. Have you learned anything from this?”
“Bobcat shifters can climb
really fast?” Felix suggested.
Tate scowled. “No. That is not what you learned. Well, that’s one thing, but not the important thing. What you learned is that you do not climb a tree unless there is an adult there watching, and do not climb any higher than they say.”
Tate turned back to Lainey, his eyes gleaming. “Well, hello, Kat.”
“I’m, ah, kind of half-naked here,” she squeaked, pressing herself into the glossy green hedge and wishing she could disappear.
Tate turned to the group of shifter cubs. “Guys, this is an important mission,” he said in a serious tone. They all perked up and looked excited. “Go find Miss Ginger, and ask her if she’s got a spare dress with her. Remember to tell her thank you.”
Shifters almost always carried spare outfits with them, because outfits couldn’t survive a shift. Lainey unfortunately didn’t carry an extra outfit with her, a legacy of her mother’s disapproval of shifting in general. When you can exist in the lovely form of a human, why would you want to be an animal? her mother would ask with a contemptuous sniff.
“Race you!” Schuyler turned and ran, and the other kids ran after her.
“Sorry about the monsters,” Tate said. “They’re quite a handful.”
“Hey, none of them tried to stab me or steal my purse,” Lainey said, thinking about the at-risk youth that she taught back home. “I consider them angels.”
“Wow. You set the bar pretty low. Who’s tried to stab you?”
Oh, crud. Now she’d opened the door to him asking her about her job, which would lead the way to him asking all kinds of questions.
“I grew up in a rough area of town,” she mumbled, which wasn’t the least bit true, unless you counted her parents’ emotional abuse as rough. “So—you’re watching these kids? Are their parents busy?”
She was instantly sorry she’d asked. A shadow crossed his face, and he shrugged. “They’re mybrothers and sisters. My parents died four years ago. I’m the parent now. Full time dad to six kids. They help me run our landscaping company, when they’re not busy driving me crazy, that is.”
“You’re so lucky to have them,” she said fervently. She meant it. Even though she’d just seen them all together for the first time, she could sense the love and affection that bound the family together.
“Lucky?” he looked amused. “I guess I am. By the way, I meant to stop by Miss Imogen’s yesterday to make sure you’d made it there okay, but I got swept up in the investigation, and now I’ve been stuck out here, helping get the place ready for the wedding. I did call, though.”
“Oh. Thank you.” Maybe he wasn’t looking at her as a suspect. Maybe he really had been interested in her. Lainey’s recent engagement had seriously messed with her confidence in her ability to judge men’s true intentions.
“I know you’re probably not staying for long, but Blue Moon Junction’s a beautiful place,” he said. “If you’d like someone to—”
All of the kids ran up to them, crowding around her. A little girl with a ponytail held up a dress that looked as if it would be the right size.
“Robin, give it to me! I should give it to her—I’m the oldest,” Schuyler said.
“No way, Jose,” Robin stuck her tongue out at her older sister and handed the dress to Lainey.
Schuyler shifted her face, and growled at Robin, but then accidentally shifted the upper half of her body, splitting her shirt. Younger shifters had less control over their transformation. “Oops.”She turned back to Lainey. “Want to see me do a magic trick? I’m a magician. I’m an escape artist, like Houdini. Tate got me a magic kit for Christmas. I can—”
“All of you, scoot,” Tate said sternly. “Find Kyle, and stay with him. Stay together, no more running around, and absolutely no climbing, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” they chorused, and trooped back towards the house.
Tate turned his back as Lainey pulled the dress over her head. It settled onto her body, fitting perfectly—and Lainey glanced down at it and winced.
It was the dress of a larger woman who was very confident in her body. It was silky, the color of a bruised plum, and it hugged her body far more closely than she would have liked, all the way down to the hips, where it flared out like a bell.
The neckline dipped low, accentuating her large breasts. Unfortunately the dress also accentuated her thick waist, and the rolls of pudge she was so self-conscious about.
She heard Tate draw in a sharp breath. He was standing there, holding her shoes and her purse, and staring at her as if she were a runway model.
“Wow,” he said, eyes wide. “You look…amazing. I mean, you always look amazing, it’s just that—I don’t know—yesterday you dressed like you want to hide your figure, and this dress just—wow. I’m sorry, I’m an idiot. Ignore me.”
A hint of red was coloring his cheekbones. He was actually blushing.
“No, you’re not an idiot.” She reached out and took the purse and shoes. Then her new, bold, re-invented self said daringly, “You just have excellent taste.”
He burst into laughter. “Well, no argument there. I like what I see.”
Now it was Lainey’s turn to blush, as she stepped into her shoes.
“Thank you,” was the only thing she could think of saying. Part of her wanted to argue and say, “Oh, this dress makes me look so fat. You can see every single pound on me, and I’d never choose a neckline this low.” But she realized that the voice in her head that wanted to say those things sounded exactly like her mother.
“So, ahh…how many brothers and sisters do you have?” she asked.
“There are twelve of us, altogether. I’m the oldest. A few of my sisters and brothers are moved out, married or in college. My brother Kyle, he’s the one you saw yesterday, works with me, running the landscaping business. My eighteen-year-old sister Megan still lives at home. She’s going to community college and she works with me part time. The six younger ones are Schuyler, she’s ten, Valerie, she’s nine, Ashley, she’s eight, Robin and Richard, they’re six, and Felix, he’s four. How about you? Brothers and sisters?”
“One brother, a year older than me. A little bit of a black sheep in the past, but he’s gotten his act together now and he’s doing great.”
She hesitated. This was the getting-to-know-each-other conversation, the conversation she couldn’t have because she’d just have to lie to him.
Life was so unfair. This man was hotter than the sun, and he actually seemed genuinely attracted to her, and she had to admit that ever since she’d laid eyes on him she’d been thinking about him constantly. But she was a visitor in town under a fake name, hiding out from the world’s most manipulative parents and nursing a broken heart. Why start something that she could never finish?
He opened his mouth to speak. He was about to ask her more about herself, where she was from, what she did for a living, questions she couldn’t answer.
Before he could, though, a teenager trotted up to him, looking flustered. She was a pretty girl with glossy blonde hair that swept past her shoulders, wearing tight, faded jeans and a big T-shirt which said Calloway Landscaping.
Tate turned to her with a low growl. “Megan, you were supposed to be watching the kids.”
“Schuyler said she could do it.”
“Felix ran up a tree and literally nearly broke his neck.” Tate’s brows drew together in a scowl. “If you say you’re watching the kids, you need to either do so or hand them over to another adult.”
Megan went pale. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“What were you doing that was so important you needed to dump your family?” He peered at her more closely. “Is your lip gloss smeared? I swear to God, if you’ve been anywhere near that Sinclair boy—”
“I haven’t!” Megan’s voice went high, angry and defensive. Lainey felt a twinge of sympathy. She could understand why Tate was protective of his sister, but she also knew what it was to cringe under the lash of family criticism.<
br />
“I’m Kat,” she said brightly, striding forward and thrusting her hand out.
“Megan,” the girl muttered. “Pleased to meet you. If you’re going to date my brother, you should talk to me first. I could tell you a few things about him…like he’s a total control freak over-reacting asswipe.”
“Date? What?” Lainey’s mouth fell open.
“Excuse you? Language.” Tate looked outraged.
“See what I mean?” Megan complained. “I’m eighteen, and he talks to me like I’m five. Do you have any idea what it’s like working with your family?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Lainey laughed. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”
“The absolute worst,” Megan agreed fervently, while Tate let out an indignant growl.
Megan looked Lainey up and down. Lainey had been getting a lot of that lately. “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Tate started dating. God knows he hasn’t gotten any in ages. Maybe if he did, he wouldn’t be such a crabby jerkwad all the time.”
Tate’s chest swelled with indignation, and it looked as if he were about to tear a strip off Megan’s head. Before he could, , they heard the kids yelling from the direction of the house. “Tate! Tate! Come here!” The kids definitely sounded alarmed about something.
With a sigh of exasperation, he headed back to the main house. Lainey followed, hoping that Felix hadn’t climbed anything else, and Megan followed her, muttering under her breath.
The children stood next to one of the wings of the mansion, clustered around a bed of recently planted flowers.
A bolt of alarm shot through Lainey. The flowers were all withered and shriveled, every last one of them, little dark knots clumped on bright red mulch.
Was this the Cypress Witch’s prophecy coming true? She fervently hoped not. Ginger and Loch seemed like such good people, so clearly in love, and she’d hate to see anything ruin their wedding.
Tate looked baffled. He knelt down and sniffed at the flowers. Even in human form, shifters had superior scenting abilities.
“Weed killer,” he said, scowling. “Somebody put weed killer on all the flowers. I smell scentsbane, too.”
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